Settlement Design

This takes a genuinely thoughtful approach to worldbuilding by treating settlements as systems that evolved rather than maps that were drawn. It walks you through ten core principles like geographic determinism and layered development, then gives you six parameter categories covering everything from site selection to symbolic spaces. The typology tables are especially practical, breaking down settlements by function, morphology, geography, and scale with actual characteristics for each. What I like is that it doesn't just give you fantasy city tropes, it teaches you to think about why a river port develops differently from a hill fort or how social hierarchies manifest in spatial organization. If you're building worlds where cities need to feel like they grew organically over centuries rather than spawned for plot convenience, this gives you the framework to do that consistently.